


Candescence

by Shoi



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Human Trafficking, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Sexual Violence, Worldbuilding, please read the author's note at the beginning, please take these tags seriously
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-29
Updated: 2018-01-14
Packaged: 2018-09-20 14:52:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 20,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9496943
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shoi/pseuds/Shoi
Summary: “If you want to get out now, you’re welcome to. But this is my hill, and I’m dying on it.”





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> hi, here's a multipart fic for y'all. i want to make it very clear that **this story will deal frankly with human trafficking and the abuse of children. rape will be discussed, though not depicted.** if you are interested in these things as titillation, this story is not for you. if these subjects are upsetting or triggering for you, please **proceed responsibly, and with your own mental and emotional health needs in mind.**
> 
> [if you'd like to read more in this universe of headcanons, please check out my wife's series of fics over here!](http://archiveofourown.org/series/554284) you will love them. :)

“ _Estás nuevo.”_

_The garden was quiet, encased in the stillness of the hours after midnight. Even the sounds of the town square have faded away. Dorado, like most places Jesse’d lived, went to bed early. Usually he preferred it that way, but the stranger’s presence on the open breezeway added an element of uncertain mystery. Jesse dug his bare toes into the freshly turned earth around the bench’s ornamental flower bed, and pressed his book against his chest._

_The stranger looked at him briefly, as though mildly startled by his presence, though he had to have known Jesse was there. Jesse’s little lantern cast a small but noticeable glow around the fountain, haloing him in soft blue light._

_“Si,” said the stranger. There was a pause as though he thought he might have more to say, but nothing else came. He was lipping a lumpy cigarette, the smoke making serpentine shapes in the still air._

_“Qué haces?” Jesse said when the silence began to feel even more uncomfortable. He heard his voice waver a little._

_The stranger turned away from the ocean and regarded him. He had a severe, handsome face, a wide, broken nose, dark eyes framed by darker lashes. When he smiled, though, the severity disappeared, replaced by real warmth and honest curiosity._

_“With the new shipping crew,” he said, in English. “West coast gang. With Felix.”_

_Jesse straightened his shoulders. He knew Felix. He didn’t like Felix at all._

_The stranger must have seen the look of distaste on his face because he laughed, a low and hearty sound, and came over to the circle of lantern light, automatically holding his cigarette away to keep off the smoke. His eyes crinkled at their corners._

_“Guessing you don’t like him much,” he said. “Me either, to be honest. Guy’s scum.”_

_“Then why do you work for him?” Jesse said, before he could stop himself. At least it didn’t sound too accusatory. He squeezed his fingers around the hard cover of his book, taking comfort in its solidity._

_The stranger didn’t look overly put out, though. He took a drag on his cigarette, and blew the smoke into the air, vapor streaming from his mouth and nostrils at once. He was like a feathered serpent, breathing wind and cloud into the sky._

_“Sometimes a man’s gotta do scummy things,” he said. His eyes were still warm. He gestured. “Como te llamas, chiquillo?”_

_“Jesse.”_

_“No con la jota?”_

_Jesse shook his head. “English J,” he said, and grinned a little. “You can say it the other way if you want, though. Lot of the servants do.”_

_“Always say a person’s name the way they tell you first,” said the stranger. “Names have power. They should be said properly.”_

_“Well, what’s yours?”_

_The stranger grinned, showing good, strong teeth beneath his moustache. “Ángel. But you can say it the other way, if you want.”_

_Jesse giggled, feeling a little odd, almost giddy. “Nah. Somebody told me once you oughta always say a person’s name the way they tell you.”_

_Ángel nodded sagely, his eyes gleaming as he pulled another drag off his cigarette. “So, what’re you doing out here in the middle of the night?”_

_“Couldn’t sleep.” Jesse held up his book. Ángel plopped down on the bench next to him and leaned over to peer at the cover, though he made no move, as another man might have, to take the book from Jesse’s hands. Jesse liked him better for it._

_“The Secret Garden,” Ángel read. Jesse detected a hint of surprise in him now, and drew in a deep breath._

_“I love books.” Ángel nodded, curious and waiting, and Jesse went on, encouraged. “I like nonfiction best, but lately I been reading a lot of literature. I like this one a lot, even though it’s kind of old fashioned. It’s -- peaceful.”_

_“I read it in high school,” Ángel said. “I wasn’t -- well.” He laughed, and stubbed his cigarette out on the side of the bench, leaving a black scuff on the stone. “I was kind of a dumb jock back then. Didn’t appreciate it.”_

_“A jock?” Jesse leaned towards him a little. He has a pleasant smell, something mild and forest-like, an almost delicate scent, devoid of aggression. “What’d you play?”_

_“Actually,” Ángel said, “I was a dancer. Ballet.”_

_“Really?” Jesse’d guessed football, maybe, or the American form of it; the man had the look of a real tough, and the thought of him in a leotard was both startling and appealing. There was poise in him that Jesse saw now, a deliberate, balanced quality of movement, of posture. He suspected Ángel wasn’t even fully aware of it; Jesse only noticed because he’d been trained to read people. “I can see that, now you mention it.”_

_“Yup.” Ángel seemed pleased and a little shy all at once. He was still smiling, but it was a distant, wistful look, and his eyes had found the sliver of moon visible behind the thin clouds. Jesse watched him, reading nothing in him but thoughtful intent, a caution he recognized, an easy confidence that no man he’d ever met before had._

_He wondered, with a sudden, icy spike of fury, what in the hell a man like this was doing here._


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jesse wasn't impatient, and he wasn't stupid.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> robert leroy parker was outlaw butch cassidy's real name. jesse's kind of a superfan.

The meal wasn’t very good, which Jesse felt was something of a crime. The _asado_ was all badly overcooked, the beef dry and the sausages hard. He spent much of the meal making bad meat disappear into his folded napkin and watching Montieth shovel ragged chunks of tough beefsteak into his mouth in between gulps of expensive wine. The wine, at least, was decent, though it sat badly on the tequila shots he’d had a few hours prior. His head buzzed unpleasantly, but in a way it was helping him focus. Nothing pleasurable here to distract him. Just pain. Jesse was well familiar with pain.

He smiled, kindly, at Montieth.

“Now,” said Montieth, as the waiter cleared their plates away, “Mr. Leroy, I hear tell you used to run with the Arizona Deadlocks. Is that true?” 

He produced a cigar from a fancy little brass tin inside his coat and held it out. Jesse took it with a grin.

“Just Parker, sir, if that ain't too formal. Mr. Leroy was my father.” He held up the cigar, and Sigma reached over his shoulder, clipped it, lit it, and handed it back. “We’re all friends here. It's true, of course. Don't know many who'd be foolish enough to lie about a thing like that.”

“Nor I,” said Monteith. His smile was thin as thin and watery as the after dinner coffee was. Jesse had been in Buenos Aires more than once, but this was the first time he’d had a bad cup of coffee. 

_What I get for letting the goddamn mark pick the restaurant._ Jesse inhaled the thick smoke, held it in his mouth for tasting for a moment before blowing out again. The smoke made a perfect ring, though Monteith didn't seem terrifically impressed. 

In all fairness, Jesse wasn’t particularly impressed with Monteith himself. Gregory Monteith was one of those rusty middle links in the center of a long chain of equally blandly offensive middle aged men, the type who transported but didn’t own, who acquired but didn’t buy or sell. He was the very definition of the banality of evil, right down to his ill-fitted suit and the jeweled golden rings on both of his small, flabby hands. His thin hair wasn’t so much graying as it was fading, and pale liver spots showed here and there on his scalp. His wariness of Jesse’s offer was not the caution of a seasoned negotiator, but that of a nervous, scavenging animal who has scented a true hunter on the wind.

Jesse leaned back in the dining chair. The cushioning of the seat had been good and firm when they sat down, but that had been nearly three hours ago by his estimation, and his tailbone ached. Sigma hadn't moved at all, and he hoped her old joints weren't frozen up too badly. “Like I said, it's true. This was back when Al Garrett ran the outfit -- you probably knew him, I'm guessing? I was with ‘em when we pulled off the Bullion Junction job.”

“Impressive. You know, when I was a young man, I liked to fancy myself a bit of a cowboy.” Montieth drained his wineglass, then immediately took a swig of his coffee. Jesse artfully contained his shudder of revulsion. “An exciting life, wasn’t it? Living off the land, playing at banditos?”

“Cowboys and outlaws are pretty different, Mr. Montieth.” Jesse drummed his fingers on the table. “Back in the old days, you know, bein’ a cowboy wasn’t more than bein’ a farmhand. Half the time cowboys were into just as much cattle rustling as any bandito.” He watched the interest fade from Montieth’s eyes, though his expression of polite listening remained. Apparently he was the kind of man who didn’t much like having his layman’s interest explained to him. “Outlaws had a little more wiggle room.”

“All right, so the Deadlocks --”

“Deadlocks were bikers and shippers, sir,” Jesse interrupted, keeping his friendly smile in place. “They fancied themselves a lot of things, but I don’t know that I’d give ‘em any labels beyond those two.”

“Fair enough,” Montieth said, dismissive. He slurped his coffee. “So the Bullion Junction job.”

_Blood, and the stinking, hated musk of men, his bare feet bruised and bleeding, every muscle straining, the tingling swoon of his Aura power rising up behind his eyes and in the back of his throat, flowing into his gun hand in a sunburst burn; the men shouting take the shot, Parker, take it, or else --_

“Wasn't long before Overwatch set in and smoked them out, as I recall.” Monteith’s face gave nothing away, but he had his hands laced together on the table, and Jesse’d already noticed him tapping the tips of his pointer fingers together. It was as plain a poker tell as any. He'd already bought the story, didn't need too much embellishment. Now he just wanted to get down to real business.

“No sir, it wasn't.” Jesse let the memory of gunsmoke and the stench of cordite and copper and pulse-burn slip away without a flinch or a flicker, just as he always had. “Lost almost five hundred mil in cargo to ‘em, too. Good riddance. So, we've had a fine meal, and I've laid my cards on the table. What do you say? You interested in doing business?”

“I am,” said Monteith. He set his cigar down, perfectly balanced, along the rim of the ivory ashtray. He was wearing a little smile that Jesse didn't like much at all. “You should know, though, Mr. Parker, that working with me comes with a few complications. Nothing a man of your associations would object to, I think, but it's only fair that I be honest with you.”

“Fair,” Jesse repeated. He was suddenly real glad that Sigma was rolling audio recording. “All right, sure.”

“Yes, fair. I like a fair exchange between me and my business partners. To me, that means transparency. Open discussion. I like my partners to know who else I’m working with, and who else they might be working with.”

Jesse didn't say anything this time, just waited for him to finish what was clearly the warm up act for whatever performance he was pulling out of his ass to test Parker Leroy’s sincerity. It was stupid, and a waste of time: any one of Leroy’s past business partners and buyers would have been happy to vouch for him, and most of them were the type of customers to make a man like Montieth shit his pants. 

But Jesse wasn't impatient, and he wasn't stupid. He smiled, and nodded, and Montieth went on.

“What with the market being what it is, these days, I’ve found it prudent to invest in partnerships -- you know, a mutual back scratching sort of arrangement.”

“For sure,” Jesse said.

“For the last two years I’ve been working with a small firm for private security. After that business with the Guillame group -- I’m guessing you heard about that, too -- I couldn’t take any chances.” Montieth gave a faintly theatric shudder. “What a terrible way to die.”

Jesse put the cigar back between his lips. The woody, spicy taste filled his mouth and his sinuses and he held it there, like maybe there was only so much room in his body for anger and frustration and he could replace at least some of it with good smoke. 

“Imagine it is,” he said. Sigma didn't make a sound save for a faint click of alarm, a noise only Jesse would have recognized for what it was. “Downright cruel thing, to do to honest businessmen.”

“Precisely.” Montieth nodded. Jesse exhaled, let go his mouthful of fury with a long plume of smoke. “Not to mention the loss of cargo. Hundreds of thousands of dollars. I’m not losing my life or my business because of someone’s carelessness.”

“It’s the new Box models,” Jesse said, nodding. “Something in the wiring, I’ve heard.”

“Which is why I’m only shipping with fourth generation Boxes.”

“Well enough,” Jesse said. “So, you were saying? Private security?”

“Yes, yes.” Montieth picked his cigar back up and leaned back in his chair. “They’ll need to vet you a bit, that’s all. Have one of their operatives stop by to monitor your work. They’re really not at all intrusive.”

“The Master’s reputation is perfectly clean,” Sigma said, the wounded indignance in her voice hampered only a little by the old damaged filter over her oral processor; her words always came out with a faint, unnerving echo. “How dare you presume--”

Jesse lifted a hand, and she fell silent. Montieth only looked amused, seeming to see her for the first time since their entrance. 

“That’s some loyalty for a Curricula,” he said, peering at Sigma with his head canted, birdlike, to one side. “I thought they scrapped those after all that drama.”

A hissing noise issued from Sigma’s filter at his choice of words, and Montieth blinked, leaned back again, grown wary. Jesse smiled a little, because his own throat wasn't capable of making such a noise. 

“K-226 here’s a different case. Had a few of her chips replaced. Some wires moved around. She’s barely a Curry anymore on the inside. Still got her teaching data and all that, but she ain’t never taught past the first grade, far as I know, and she’s been recased a few times.”

“Does that mean she was one of them?” Montieth said. Jesse didn't like the hint of weird eagerness in his voice, the gleam in his eyes. “One of the killers?”

“Don’t rightly know,” Jesse lied, his smile thinned and starting to hurt his lips. “Bought her third or fourth hand. She’s just my assistant, now -- you mind if we get on with business? As I was about to say, I’ve got no problem with a little vetting. Me and my operation, we got nothing to hide.”

“Of course.” Montieth waved a hand dismissively. “Listen, it’s just a formality. Given the sensitive nature of the business over all. You’d think with Overwatch dead and buried it’d be less difficult, but…”

“The Devil’s persistence,” Jesse said, and blew smoke through his nostrils. When he grinned, Montieth grinned back at him, and Jesse allowed himself to think, with brief contentment, about what he’d look like torn into a thousand bloody little scraps of flesh and bone.

***

“I don’t like this,” Sigma said, as Jesse fumbled with the key to their hotel room. The keypad beeped at him unhappily, and he pressed the little chunk of plastic against it for a moment, trying to hold on to his temper. He’d paid out the nose for the suite, but it was worth it -- in the nicer places people were likely to bother a man for his comings and goings, and they definitely wouldn't question him staying in a one-queen-bed with two Omnics and no one else. That sort of thing was exactly what an apparently wealthy man got a hotel room for, after all.

“I don’t like it -- what kind of ‘vetting’ will this be?” Sigma’s old joints whirred and clicked as she gesticulated, the sounds nearly swallowing the soft, giving whoosh of the door’s lock. Jesse held the door for her automatically and she went in without looking at him, all dignity and outrage. Jesse’d always had a vision of her in his head, of what she might have looked like as a human being: a small, slightly stooped elderly woman, gray hair put up in a severe bun, thin limbs and growing liver spots, deceptive muscle beneath papery-skin. The damage to her filter gave her voice a quavering quality, which only added to the effect. Jesse supposed she’d have been a young woman, during her teaching days, but he struggled to picture her as anything other than the grizzled and life-hardened old bird he knew her to be. 

The Curricula -- early, second generation Omnics whose primary use had been as schoolteachers -- were tall, wiry shaped beings, their torsos shaped into gently curving S forms, their limbs positioned like a human’s, though unlike a human a Curry model could extend its arms to nearly three times their resting length with a bit of work. Their heads were circular, rather than boxy, their edges soft and curving; a necessary accent when one might be surrounded at any given time by small, grabbing hands and fragile little heads. Some of Sigma’s casing was cracked and in places, and once polished places had grown dull with time, but she’d always refused repair. Jesse understood. He supposed he’d be the same, in her position.

“Easy,” he said, dropping his side-bag into the uncomfortably circular modern chair by the sitting room’s window. “You’ll scare the little one.”

“They should be scared,” Sigma retorted, wiping the silver chrome paint from her orbital rims, revealing the copper ovals that surrounded her optics. “This one’s gotten wise.”

“Not that wise.” Jesse rubbed his face with both hands for a moment, trying to work the feeling back into his cheeks. The alloy of his left hand was pleasantly cool, but not inhumanly so, and he pressed it, briefly, against his burning sinuses. “Christ, I hate this climate. Nasal passages are swollen all the hell up.”

“Mm,” Sigma agreed, wiping long streaks of paint onto her towel. “We’ll both probably need more oiling. If you don’t mind,” she added. 

Jesse heard the faint apology in her voice. He dropped his hands. “You know I ain’t mad at you for -- I mean, shit, Sig. It’s gotta be worse on you to call me that than it is on me to hear it.”

“Still,” Sigma said primly, turning away from him to take up the water pitcher of cleansing lubricant she’d left on the low coffee table before their departure. “Neither of us likes it. I’ll avoid it next time.”

“You’ll do what you’ve gotta do to hold cover,” Jesse said firmly. “We both know we’re not masters or slaves, Sig. Same as we know this job ain’t what we really do.”

She didn’t respond to that, and by her posture he surmised she didn’t want to discuss it further. He didn’t blame her. “I’ll check on the kid,” he said, instead, and she lifted her shoulders a little in ascent, without looking up. 

The door to the second bedroom was closed, but Jesse could hear the data server humming softly from within, could feel the chill of the room curling out from beneath the door’s crack. He knocked lightly, and was rewarded with a scrabbling noise, a high, piping voice exclaiming in surprise.

“It’s just me, kid,” he called, keeping his voice low and gentle. “We’re back for the night. Everything okay here?”

“Oh!” the voice exclaimed, and a moment later the door opened. Zero peered out at him, their one large optic flexing, contracting, then dilating. “Jesse. Hello. Hi. That took some time.” 

“Sure,” Jesse said kindly. “You wanna come out here and get oiled? I bet you’re feeling pretty dry.”

“Oh! Well, yes. I’d, I would. Thank you.” There was the brief sound of Zero arranging themself for better mobility, and then they trundled out with a cautious whistle, head-casing turning a full 360 degrees to survey the room for potential threat, their stubby feet whirring softly which each movement. 

Jesse didn’t chid them for their wariness; he knew full well where it came from. He’d found the little Omnic two years prior, wailing and beeping in terror and pain, buried beneath a pile of burned and shattered parts in the back room of a deserted chop-shop in California. Zero was a small patchwork thing composed of parts and metals from more than a dozen other Omnics and even some nonsentient machines. They had cried upon seeing him, and reached up with all four arms.

They’d been badly hurt, leaking coolant and oils the moment he’d lifted them out of the mire, but at the sound of his voice they had twisted their head up just enough to look at him, then buried their faceplate against his shoulder with an exhausted venting of steam and heat. He’d barely been able to make out the tiny “thank you” that emerged from them, but it had been enough to put a crack in his recently hardened heart. He knew well how it felt: that moment when strong hands pulled you from the sucking, drowning waters of a lifetime of hurt. He’d cradled the little Omnic to his chest, murmuring soothing words with little meaning, and tried not to think about people long gone.

Six months later, with the help of a metal-doc he trusted -- and a considerable amount of funds -- Zero was healthy again, as much as they could be. They were a torso piece no longer than Jesse’s arm, four spindly little arms attached to the backplate so they arched up over Zero’s head like a scorpion’s tail, a pair of short, stubby legs that gave them more of a waddle than a walk, and a boxy head with one big, glowing eye in the center. They’d been repainted black, all over, done in matte -- when Jesse had explained the stealth advantages of matte paint instead of chrome, Zero had been insistent on getting it, clearly liking the idea of better being able to hide themself from danger.

That, too, Jesse understood. He'd lost his own shine years ago, and had never had cause to miss it. It was always better not to stand out.

Both Omnics were too dry and too damp in turns, thanks to the heat and humidity, and it took Jesse a bit of work to get them comfortable again. Sigma sat still, her austere profile held still and proud, and thanked him now and then in a soft voice, though she turned away from him when he was done. Zero either didn’t notice or didn’t care about her distance; they extended all four of their arms and each one of their delicate grasping fingers, making a sweet humming noise of pleasure as Jesse polished and oiled. When Jesse finished, they folded back up again, pulling in on themself until they resembled a small black suitcase with a head attachment poised atop. 

“I want to rest,” they said, a little plaintive. “Is it ok? Jesse? Is it ok? I’m tired.”

“It’s fine, kid.” Jesse touched the rounded knob on the top of their head affectionately. “I can handle the boxes myself. Fold on up.”

Zero cheeped, and withdrew their head into their case, their signal light dimming to a pleasant soft green. 

“I have a bad feeling about this man,” Sigma said. She hadn’t moved from her chair at all, and bore an eerie resemblance to a statue in the late night dim. Her optic visor glowed and pulsed gently. “This Montieth and his friends. His associates.”

“You don’t have to like him.” Jesse began putting up his toolkit. The throbbing headache was growing worse with every passing moment. “Ain’t like you’re marrying him.”

She hissed grimly through her filter. “He’s planning something. He’s suspicious. We should break and run.”

“We’re not breaking and we’re not running,” Jesse said, not bothering to soften his words; he both heard and felt the steel in them, syllables like bullets from a gun. “If you want to get out now, you’re welcome to. But this is my hill, and I’m dying on it.”

She turned around then, a movement so swift even he couldn't fully track it; her hand gripped his metal wrist tightly enough that the electronic nerve endings screamed. She caught his other wrist just before it brushed the haft of his belt knife, and he stared at her, feeling her terrible strength, remembering every photo and vid and story about the Curriculae Omnics, those among the first to respond to the Omnium’s call for war. Jack had shown him the old pictures himself: broken metal skeleton cases, burned black and slumped in the middle of all those tiny flesh bodies, the blood splattered on walls and ceilings, small discarded shoes, cracked lunch boxes. “They were some of the first,” Jack had said, his voice soft and his face grave, “So they turned on the humans who were nearest. Whole classrooms like this. It was bad,” he’d added, with his characteristic haunted simplicity, his eyes hollow and much too calm. 

Sigma had been a preschool teacher, once. Every fiber of her being had been composed together for that purpose. 

“You,” she said, squeezing with both hands, “are not dying here at all. Do you understand me?”

“Why, Sig,” Jesse drawled, trying to cover his vague and mounting panic, “I didn’t know you cared so --”

“Of course I do,” she snapped, “But it isn’t just about you now, is it? You’re needed. I need you. I cannot do this by myself. Are you so selfish that you’d let yourself die before the work is done?”

“This work will never be done,” Jesse said, voice hoarse now. “You know that. It wasn’t done when I was a kid, and it’s not done now. They just get smarter. Hide it better.”

“But so do we.” Sigma released his arms, and Jesse pulled them back with a wince, touching the metal left in search of wiring damage. “We’re already better, and smarter. What’s the tally now, Jesse Mccree? The total number since we started?”

Jesse opened his mouth to respond -- the number was burned, always, into the front of his brain -- but Zero piped up suddenly. 

“Four hundred-twenty-six,” they said. Their head lifted up out of their torso, optic half-lidded in shy apology for their eavesdropping. “Four hundred-twenty-six.”

“Oh, kid.” Jesse rose, distantly glad for a reason to move, and went to kneel beside them. “Kid, this kind of talk isn’t for your ears.”

“I know, I know what. What we’re doing here,” Zero said, a little hint of uncharacteristic rebellion in their tiny voice. “I want to do it. You saved me. I want to save others too.”

_I want to dedicate my life,_ Jesse heard his own voice saying, much younger here, without the gravel of exhaustion. _You saved me so I could save others._

He didn’t have a response to that, or to the echo of himself at 17, so he was silent instead, stroking Zero’s head until the defiant tension left their small body.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Candescence. The end, motherfucker. The big final flash bang of karma. Ain’t no shield you can hire to save you from that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please again heed the warnings at the beginning of the fic. this chapter begins to delve into the subject matter at hand. thank you <3

In the morning Jesse left the Omnics to their rest and went out in search of a decent cafe. 

He came away from a small shop with the biggest cafe con leche money could buy, and two croissants hastily folded into a napkin. The young man at the counter had given him a heavy-lidded look, a thoughtful little smile curving generous lips, and for a moment Jesse had thought about it. The kid was pretty, for sure, with smooth dark skin and nicely defined arms wrapped in intricate, colorful flower tattoos from his biceps to his wrists. But when Jesse had paused to measure the look on his face, any interest he might have summoned crumbled abruptly to ash in his stomach. He knew what he looked like, these days -- beauty was subjective, of course, and he knew that better than most, but he knew also that if he’d seen a man as rough looking as he was giving that kid so much as a sideways look, it would’ve taken an act of God to keep him from interfering. So he’d taken his change and given the kid an apologetic smile, and he’d gone quietly out onto the sunny street. 

It was hot already, and the temperature did a little to soothe the cold chill that still clung to his spine. Yesterday’s headache hadn’t diminished much with his four hours of sleep, and he felt a little like the tail end of a serious bar and whiskey bender, minus the good buzz that usually began such an adventure. His knees felt weak, and after a few steps he forced himself to take a seat at one of the cafe’s street-side tables, beneath the dubious shade of a colorful umbrella. He drank his coffee, outwardly composed as stone, trembling inside. 

He knew perfectly well why he was on edge. He was by and large a highly self examining man, always checking his own corners and ensuring his lines were straight where they needed to be straight and that they curved where they needed to curve. He’d been told once, by a faintly exasperated psychologist, that the intensity of his focus on his own functionality was itself a symptom of dysfunction. He’d laughed at her -- not unkindly, but with the gentle helplessness his various damages evoked. 

_I don’t know how else to be,_ he’d said. _I’ve gotta know where I’m putting my feet. What my face is doing. Tone of my voice. Total control of myself -- that’s been the only defense I’ve had for a long time, right? My self is all I’ve ever had. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to stop fighting for it, even if a time comes when I don’t need to anymore._

He’d tried, though, for the doctor’s sake, and for the sake of all the people who’d put their faith in his ability to recover and rebuild. For a while, it’d felt like he’d succeeded. 

But things changed. 

Jesse finished his coffee and both croissants and stood, brushing crumbs from his rumpled suit jacket and jeans. He’d agreed to meet with Montieth and his partners at the storage warehouse where Montieth’s cargo was kept, so that Jesse could inspect the goods and count the numbers and Montieth’s security could inspect Jesse. He knew by now that they’d probably found a way to get into his hotel room, where they’d encounter Sigma still in sleep mode and Zero nowhere to be seen, thanks to the little bot’s ability for camouflage. They’d turn up a passport or two, one for a Mr. Parker Leroy and another for a Mr. Alonzo Harvey; these would be no cause for alarm, as most people participant in the business carried a few extra identities around in case of emergencies. They’d find messages to a wife named Angelika Place and a mistress called only Murasaki, the former mainly generic birthday wishes and requests for status updates, the latter flowery and full of silly poems and emojis on both ends. They’d find Sigma’s update and maintenance files, including a bill of sale with her manufacturing numbers on it and a note regarding a control chip upgrade. They’d find a few weapons, but nothing more extreme than what might be needed for self defense -- again, a standard for the business. If they looked closely, they might even find a few mementos of his time in Deadlock: an old photo or two, a tattered motorcycle flag with the grinning skull emblem airbrushed across it. 

Largely, they’d find that Parker Leroy was exactly who he, and his past business partners, said he was: a former gunrunner grunt turned entrepreneur, a man of casual and flexible morals, a monetarily well endowed figure willing to overpay on his purchases and undersell himself on his sales. The perfect partner. The perfect mark. 

What they would never find was Jesse Mccree, their dawning destruction, the inevitable mushroom cloud on the horizon of all they’d ever known.

Amari had trained him in the ways of explosives, beginning with ground level chemical explanations and science, and he’d drunk up every word. _“You get nothing from an explosive compound unless some other influence is exerted,”_ she’d said, the scent of gasoline and glycerin clinging to them both. _“Something like heat, or a sudden shock. A catalyst. A tiny change in the status quo -- something that moves, or changes, or breaks.”_

_Combustion,_ Jesse thought. The rabbit-quiver in his gut had stopped, given way to iron. _Candescence. The end, motherfucker. The big final flash bang of karma. Ain’t no shield you can hire to save you from that._

He whistled to himself as he walked back to the hotel. 

***

“How many head, did he say?” Sigma murmured to him, as they waited outside the barred and chained doors of the warehouse. “He did tell you, didn’t he?”

“Hundred’n six,” Jesse replied, squinting a casual smile at one of the armed guards standing by the watch-house. “But I think he’s holding at least another fifty-odd in reserve.”

“For what?”

“Close partners. Friends. Even bigger dupes than us. Could be anything.” Jesse itched for a cigarette, but forced his hands to stillness at his sides, not wanting to give any impression of nervousness. He wasn’t nervous in the slightest, but a lot of people seemed to think you could read body language like a bold printed book. One could, he supposed, but that book would be in a dozen different languages, letters and whole words upside down, sentences removed and blacked out. No living thing was a universal language, after all. “Don’t worry too much, Sig. I’ll get them.”

“I don’t worry,” she said, giving a little sniff, her chin lifting proudly. “Not nearly as much as you think.”

“I don’t believe that,” Jesse said, and touched his forelock with a little bob of his head as Montieth’s car pulled up the dusty roadway, a hazy cloud of rock-grit streaming out behind it like a rocket’s tail. “Mr. Montieth.”

“Mr. Leroy,” Montieth called back as he got out, tapping dust from his shoes with a small frown. He came towards them with his hand extended, and gripped Jesse’s fingers in a hold he probably thought was tight and confident. It felt a little like caressing a dead fish. 

“I told you,” Jesse said, grinning, “Just Parker. Ain’t we all friends here now, after all?” 

“As you say,” Montieth said, giving him a sallow smile in return. “All right, then. Mr. Parker.”

“Good enough.” Jesse stepped into him and clapped him companionably on the back, counting the bodyguards that were still clambering out of the car behind him. There were three in all, which he supposed boded well, though he wondered which of them had come with the new business partnership. 

As though reading his mind, Montieth said, “I’m afraid my partner’s representative is running a little late, but he’ll be meeting us here shortly, he says. Apparently getting breakfast is more important than being on time.”

“Don’t like a man who ain’t punctual,” Jesse said. “Says a lot about how he does his business, don’t you think?”

“Indeed,” Montieth said, looking gratified. “So, shall we get started without him? I’m sure you want to have a look at the stock before you make any final decisions. I run a healthy operation, of course, but I’m not too proud to let you inspect first.”

“Good man.” Jesse snapped his fingers at Sigma, who obediently produced a thin tablet and a stylus from her chest-space, the hingest on its little door whirring softly. “Keep count, note any oddities, any special cases. And keep an eye out for quality product,” he added, careful not to look at Montieth as he said it. “We’ve got that reserve funding for something really nice.”

“Do you?” Montieth said, thoughtful, but Jesse only nodded, letting the bait dangle on its hook a little longer. The guards had opened the big doors by then, and he strode inside with arrogant confidence, Sigma buzzing gently behind him, the sound of Montieth’s expensive shoes and his guards’ combat boots loud and echoing against the concrete floor. 

The warehouse was a wide, chilly expanse of cryo-fog and softly flickering lights. Jesse’s breath hissed from between his teeth in a wave of steam, and he felt goosebumps rising along his arms and the back of his neck with the cold. 

“Let’s start here,” he said, gesturing to the stack of boxes to his immediate left. 

The boxes were all uniformly about 3 by 3 meters, titanium and flex-metal painted in discrete matte grays and blacks. Small control panels set along the rims described the status of the contents: temperature, sedation depth, nutrition levels, waste storage capacities. _HEALTH_ was indicated on each one by a pleasant green light. There were a variety of buttons beside it, offering the user several options; _ANTI-ATROPHY ELECTROSTIMULATION_ , said one, _NEURAL-ACTIVITY SCAN_ the one after it. Each box hissed quietly every handful of minutes.

“Venting carbon dioxide,” Montieth said helpfully from Jesse’s side. “To prevent any build up inside.”

“I know what it’s for,” Jesse said, and rested his metal hand atop the nearest box. _S ASN, M,_ it read. _8YO._

“This shipment is about 65% male,” Montieth went on, gesturing expansively towards the other neatly stacked boxes, as far as the eye could see. “There’s been more demand recently.”

“Age range?” Jesse asked, quietly.

“Five to twelve, give or take a few older ones. Sometimes the look is worth the extra --”

“Are they trained yet?”

Montieth frowned. “No,” he said. “It’s been harder to get pre-training for years, you know, and I don’t trust any laymen to do it properly. Amateurs just ruin the product.”

Jesse wondered, briefly, what Montieth’s blood might taste like, if it would be as rotten and sour as the flesh of his heart, if all that flowed through him was the putrid coagulation of what it meant to be human. 

“True,” he said, and watched Sigma make several marks on her tablet in silence. He sensed Montieth’s nervousness, and knew that despite his best efforts some stench of the hatred inside of him was escaping, enough for Montieth’s dumb animal senses to pick up on it. He squared his shoulders and walked away from the stack towards the next one, with each step reminding himself why he was here, why his endurance mattered, what he could do if he could just hold on to his sanity a little bit longer. 

Whatever else, in every conceivable way, Jesse had been well trained to put forward the best persona for the task at hand. By the time they reached the next stack he was calm, jovial, an animal himself, and Montieth was smiling again, and laughing at his wry jokes. He was in control again.

“By my count,” Sigma said, when they’d made their loop of the warehouse and had returned to the doorway for final negotiations, “There are one hundred and eight head here. Sixty-seven male, forty-one female. The age range estimate is correct. Each individual appears healthy, with good brain activity and nutrition levels. By my initial assessment, Mr. Montieth has been honest in his portrayal of his product, and the product is worth the price he names.”

“Good,” Jesse said, and turned to Montieth, who was beaming with pleasure at Sigma’s words. “Well, Mr. Montieth, barring any further complications, I’d say I’m happy to do business with you today.”

“Likewise,” said Montieth, but he paused. “Actually, you mentioned outside that you were looking for -- special product? That you had funds set aside for it?”

“Sure,” Jesse said. He imagined he could see slobber forming at the corners of Montieth’s mouth, the eagerness in his voice held barely in check. “It’d have to be somethin’ real good, though. Rare. Pretty,” he added, and smiled. “You got something like that?” 

“In fact, I --”

“Mr. Montieth,” one of the bodyguards interrupted, his fingertips touching his ear, and Jesse cursed internally when Montieth turned to face him. “He’s here.”

“Oh, good. Finally. Have him meet us outside, please.” When the bodyguard nodded and retreated, Montieth turned back, looking apologetic. “Mr. Parker, you know of course I’m eager to sell, but --”

“Eager, huh,” Jesse said, letting a little of his anger drive, now. “Sure doesn’t seem that way, all of a sudden.”

“No, no, no.” Montieth held up his hands with a nervous laugh. “It’s just that the representative is here, and he’ll still need to vet you -- there’s also another, ah, complication.”

“So,” Jesse said, smiling nastily, “Is this how it usually goes with you? Because it ain’t how it usually goes with me. You say you run a tight ship, Mr. Montieth, but so do I, and I don’t like complications.”

“It’s just that my partners have expressed an interest in this shipment themselves,” Montieth blurted, his eyes so wide the yellowed-whites were visible all the way around the iris. “It’s unexpected. They don’t really deal in cargo like this -- at first I thought he was joking, but he doesn’t -- I don’t think he jokes very much, Mr. Parker. I don’t think he finds a great deal very funny at all.” 

“I’m not finding this terrifically amusin’ myself, now.” Jesse stepped towards him, and the two remaining bodyguards tensed visibly. “They’re showing interest? This ain’t an auction, friend. I didn’t sign up for one.”

“Please,” Montieth said, sounding agonized. “Please, just be patient. You’re offering much more money than they are, for one -- really, this will just be a matter of talking it over and making it clear to them that you’re my better option. You _are_ my better option. That’s true.”

“You say they don’t deal in cargo like this -- what the hell do they want it for, then?” Jesse tried to make his brain work through the fog of his emotions. His throat was dry to the point of burning. “If they’re not gonna sell it, then what do they want it for?”

“Buyer’s business,” said a voice from behind him, a terrible, rasping voice, a sound like dry dead sinew grating across exposed bone. Jesse turned, his gun leaving its holster, leveling it instinctively in the direction of the voice, as Sigma gave an angry hiss and stepped away. 

The stranger didn’t move, though the barrel of Jesse’s gun wasn’t more than a foot from his face. He was tall, broad in the shoulder and powerful of limb, but that was all Jesse could tell; the man wore a black hood and a mask, a bone-white mask that looked like some awful melding of barn owl and human skull. It hid every possible area of identification, eyes and ears and jaw, and the rest of him was just black, all the way down. There was a strange black-purple smoke curling from around his feet and his hands, which were lowered calmly at his sides, claw-tipped gloves loose and relaxed. 

The head canted, slightly, to the left, and Jesse knew he was looking at the gun. 

“Apologies,” the stranger said, sounding not in the least apologetic. “You might as well put that away.”

“Back up,” Jesse said. His teeth clicked together painfully over the words. “Go on.”

The stranger made a weird little hissing noise, but Jesse could hear the amusement in the sound. He stepped back without argument, turning his clawed hands palm upwards to show them empty, but Jesse kept the gun trained, feeling the itching swell in the back of his head, his Aura power rising with his adrenaline. 

“Mr. Parker,” Montieth said, laying his cold dead fish hand on Jesse’s bare arm with such suddenness that Jesse nearly turned and shot him instead, “Please put the gun down. This is the Talon representative I’ve been talking about.”

“Talon,” Jesse repeated. The rabbit-quiver in his belly had returning, unbidden, insatiable; his vision swam yellow and orange at the edges. “You’re working with Talon.”

“Well,” said the owl-masked man, unkindness curling around his words just like the uncanny smoke that drifted from his body at intervals, “To be fair, Mr. Leroy -- so are you.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Help me.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry this one took a while. <3 real life, so busy!

_Ángel met him nearly every evening after that first encounter._

_It was an impressive thing, Jesse thought, with immense internal sarcasm, considering he was rarely in the same place each time. Sometimes it was the garden, when the weather was nice and the sky clear, but other times it was the servant’s dining room, or the little nook just off the hall leading to Hynson’s study. The man seemed to have a good sense of his hours, too, which put the cold chill of wary anger up the back of Jesse’s neck. It meant he was being observed without him knowing, which was not good. Jesse almost always knew when he was being watched. Always seeing, especially when he was being seen himself, had long been his primary defense, and this stranger was robbing him of it._

_He began to take more elaborate forays through the house and grounds, when his days were finished. He found hidden nooks he’d never made note of before, little sitting benches and spaces between flower pots where he could crouch and read his books in peace. For a little while it seemed to be working; he managed to go two full days without seeing Ángel at all._

_One night, however, Jesse was on the roof outside his bedroom window -- a flat little platform of smooth adobe tile, with a guardrail at the end. He’d been perched up there with another of his paper books, and he saw the man walk slowly across the courtyard, his gate purposeful, his eyes roving._

_“You lookin’ for something?” he called, bitterness on his tongue._

_The man looked up at the sound of his voice, dismay and surprise coiling his lips. Then he smiled and was unreadable again, turning towards Jesse and spreading his hands in a rueful gesture. “You caught me. What’re you doing up there?”_

_Jesse jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “My bedroom,” he explained. “Gets warm in there sometimes.”_

_“Up there?” Ángel blinked. In the low moonlight his dark eyes were highlighted, flashing with yellow, warm and luminous. “In the tower?”_

_Jesse pressed his marker into the book’s spine and closed it. The marker was thin and sturdy metal, and it was shaped like a carrot that was smiling. It had been a gift from the cook on his birthday a few years past. “Yes,” he said, feeling oddly wary. “Where else would it be?”_

_“I don’t know, with your folks?” Ángel shrugged, as Jesse’s stomach bottomed out. “I figured they’d want to keep you close.”_

_“My folks,” Jesse repeated, because he didn’t know what else to say. Ángel nodded, but he’d caught the incredulity in Jesse’s voice, and he was frowning._

_“Do they not work here? Or -- are you the boss’s kid?”_

_A sudden laugh bubbled up in the back of Jesse’s throat, hysterical and disbelieving, but he swallowed it before it escaped. “I’m,” he said, and swallowed again, “I’m coming down. Hold on.”_

_He put his book down on the adobe and levered himself over the railing to grab the trellis of morning glories beneath the window. It was only a single story to the ground, and he made the climb often late into the night, when he didn’t feel like meeting anybody in the hall and talking or being looked at. Ángel half lifted a hand as though he wanted to caution him to be careful, but he seemed to think better of it at the last moment, and instead his mouth thinned, exhaling through his nostrils as Jesse hit the ground lightly on the balls of his feet._

_“I didn’t mean to disturb you,” Ángel said awkwardly. “Really.”_

_“You’re always looking for me, though.” Jesse flexed his bare toes in the grass, which was damp from the day’s rain. He looked stoically at the man. “Isn’t that right? No reason for you to run into me so often otherwise.”_

_Ángel’s face grew still, and then there was a closing, a shuttering of whatever it was he’d been wearing on his emotional surface; he looked at Jesse now with calm, cool eyes, jaw loose, no sign of tension anywhere in his body. Jesse read surprise in him, discomfort, and a practiced effort to hide himself away from anybody who might be fluent in his personal kinetic languages._

_“You’re pretty sharp, chiquillo,” he said. It was the verbal equivalent of a cautious step forward, a hand on the shoulder, a seeking of reassurance. Jesse could read Ángel’s internal_ oh, fuck, _as clearly as if he’d spoken it aloud._

_“Have to be,” Jesse said, flexing his fingers. “Most people have no idea how to read body language, you know. They think they do, but they don’t. I do, though. I really do.” He peered at the man. He wasn’t afraid. He already knew this one was probably different._

_“Yeah?” Ángel smiled slightly, with startling warmth. It made Jesse even more wary. A man with a warm smile was nearly always a danger. “And what’s my book telling you, right now?”_

_“Mostly,” Jesse said, “That you got no idea what Hynson’s involved in, or what your boss is here to buy.”_

_“Fair enough.” He was still smiling, and there was something kind and almost sweet in his eyes, something that made Jesse flush and turn away in vague embarrassment. “Anything else?”_

_“I’m not gonna say it here, pendejo,” Jesse snapped, disliking the calm with which Ángel was taking this, the way his own face burned as though he had something to be ashamed of. As if he himself had taken some part in any of this. “You know he’s got cameras everywhere, right?”_

_“I know.” Ángel slipped his hands into his pockets, squinting. “I also know I’m wearing a mobile scrambler. Interferes with local signal transmission. A little static now and then’s probably pretty common, right next the ocean. Salt water’s an interesting complication when it comes to electro-pulse equipment.” He lifted a hand, wiggling the fingers. “Makes things go all hinky sometimes.”_

_Jesse knew he should’ve been frightened by that, the knowledge that he was alone with this man, this stranger, unmonitored, unseen. But there was nothing in this dark more frightening than what he’d already seen in the light, only his own long buried anger and resentment._

_“You’re a spy,” he said, knowing it wasn’t quite the right word, but having no other to use. “Aren’t you?”_

_“Something like that,” Ángel agreed, beaming at him. “Sharp, like I said.”_

_Jesse lifted his chin. “So why tell me? You got no guarantee I won’t sell you out. You oughta see what they do to people who cross ‘em.” He wanted leverage, suddenly, something to weigh against the request he could now sense coming; some small fistful of power when he’d lived his life so empty-handed._

_But Ángel would give him no such relief, it seemed. “Is that,” he asked, so calmly that Jesse knew it was meant to be a barb, something to spur him into a break, “what happened to your folks?”_

_“No,” Jesse said, and gave him a cold, sharp smile, his most doll like, his most empty of life. “Who the fuck you think you are, Ángel? You’re in way, way over your head.”_

_To his credit Ángel was undaunted, save for the grim twist of his own mouth as the realization that this was going to be much harder than he’d assumed hit him._

_“Maybe so,” he said. “But you haven’t answered my question.”_

_“Sure,” Jesse said, baring his teeth, “Okay. Ask me again. Tell me you really don’t know.”_

_Ángel held up his hands, the palms exposed and open, the smile disappearing from his face. Jesse saw the confusion in him now, and worse, the concern. “Kid, I’m sorry. I’ve obviously offended you. I really don’t know -- whatever it is you’re trying to get at. Do you,” he swallowed, and stepped forward, and Jesse smelled his cologne and his sweat, both clean and simple scents. He saw the tired darkness beneath his brown eyes. “Do you need -- are you in some kind of trouble? Do you need help?”_

_Of all the things he could have said, that was the last thing Jesse had expected to hear. He opened his mouth, his face aching from its contortions, his eyes burning._

_“Yes,” he said, the words bursting from him beyond his control. “Help me.” Then he burst into tears, heaving, hysterical sobs that he could not quiet, even when Ángel’s arms came around him and pressed him to his chest._

***

The owl-masked man was leaking black smoke. 

It slithered from the creases and corners of his clothing, odorless, where gaps of flesh might have otherwise showed, a greasy blackness that was constant. It dissipated into nothingness when it got more than a few inches from him. Jesse couldn’t determine if it was the effect of an unknown Aura power -- like his own burning sight, when the Eye came upon him -- or if it was simply the man’s nature. Maybe he was an oil fire wrapped in black leather and given man-shape. 

The occasional flash of orange-red fire behind the eyes of his mask would certainly be better explained, in that case.

They’d boarded Monteith’s private train car out of the forested canyon, and it was exactly as Jesse’d imagined it: done cheaply in excess of gold and mahogany, with tinkling crystal light fixtures and uncomfortable looking leather furniture. The place smelled of spilled wine and old cigar smoke, and something nastily human, something musty and thick and all too familiar to him. 

“I’m guessing you didn’t know,” the masked man said. His voice was a grating hiss, always, as though he wore some kind of chord modifier. Jesse pressed his teeth into his stale cigarillo, drawing in the smoke the way a lion draws in scent through the mouth. 

“Didn’t,” he said, “But it don’t matter none.” He’d found himself exaggerating the accent around this man -- this creature -- for reasons he couldn’t really explain. He knew himself well enough to trust his instincts for cover and secrecy, but it bothered him, in a distant sort of way, that he couldn’t yet decide how to deal with this new twist beyond the immediate display of calm acceptance. “Ain’t troubled. I had half a mind to see about getting in with the likes of you all eventually, anyway. Mr. Monteith’s just savin’ me a bit of trouble, is all.”

The owl-man hummed a neutral sound of acknowledgement. When he shifted there was a creak of leather, but also of something else, something that spoke of old bone and long dried sinew. Jesse was careful not to look at him, and went on gazing out of the light-train window, watching the landscape flash by beneath the levitating track. He wished Sigma had come on board with him, but she’d returned to the hotel to log her video records with Zero, and, Jesse suspected, to comfort the little bot until his return.

“They call me the Reaper,” the owl-man said after a moment. There was no particular bravado in his words, only the calm statement of facts. 

“Parker,” said Jesse, and couldn’t quite help himself, “Ain’t that name a little ostentatious?” 

“Big word, for a man playing dumb,” said the Reaper, and Jesse looked up at him, feeling an angry flush creep up the back of his neck. “I guess it is. I don’t really care what they call me, if I’m being honest.” When he walked forward it was much closer to a glide, much like the train, hovering through the trick of magnets and technology. He came up beside Jesse at the picture window and Jesse felt the unearthly chill that came off him now, the first bite of a winter wind. 

_You’re a dumb kid,_ he thought fiercely to himself, well aware that the words in his head came in a voice not his own. _You’re a dumb fucking kid and you’re going to get yourself killed if you don’t stop pushing your luck._

“You assumin’ an accent’s a marker of lesser intelligence is something in itself, don’t you think?” he said, smiling a little, the hairs on the back of his neck standing painfully on end. “Just ‘cause I talk a little country, you say I’m playin’ dumb.”

“You are playing dumb,” said the Reaper, steadily. A little hiss followed his words, like the stinger on a scorpion. “Accent’s nothing to do with it. Why is a businessman of your experience, for example, trying to pay twice the market price for goods he’s supposedly been trading in for years?”

“Good stock’s harder to get every year,” Jesse said, “Ever since Overwatch and their fucking crusade. Shipping lanes are down to two or three per continent, and all of ‘em are watched -- wouldn’t put it past a few of the rats who jumped off that sinking ship to be eyeballing us even now.” He looked up, taking the cigarillo out of his mouth. “If you’re in the market to buy, you’d think you’d know all that, yourself.”

The Reaper hissed again, but it was a laugh, low and without pleasure.

“I,” he said, “Am just quality assurance. I suppose you’re a more hands on businessman than my employers.”

Jesse caught his furious tongue before it escaped him and doomed the mission and his own life. 

“First thing you oughta learn about this work,” he said, instead of the fire that had crept up his throat, threatening explosion, “Is that we don’t mix business with pleasure. Clean product, no used goods. They ain’t worth the price if they’re damaged.” _Damaged goods,_ his stupid brain chanted at him, wildly. _Damaged goods, damaged goods. ‘Take him. He’s outgrown his use.’_

The Reaper was looking at him oddly, a stillness in the long dark form that hadn’t been there before, the head tilted just so. “Is that so.”

“That’s so,” Jesse said, trying to put a point of finality on the conversation. “So tell me, Mr. Reaper. How much money is it gonna take to make you and Talon go away? Just name it.” 

“Talon isn’t going away,” the Reaper said placidly. He hadn’t moved. “I suppose you’re not aware that our mutual friend Monteith is a fellow employee of mine -- of ours, I’m sorry. We’re in the same business, you and I, so far as my information’s told me.” 

“You’re mistaken,” Jesse said flatly. He could feel the phantom noose slipping down around his neck now, ready to be tightened. “I’ve never worked for Talon.”

“You did,” the Reaper insisted, in the same calm way. “Different name, though. That might be where the confusion’s coming from. And,” he added, as Jesse opened his mouth to respond, “It’s no good lying to me about it. I know.”

“Yeah?” Jesse stared at him, feeling hip deep in something he hadn’t signed up for and not liking the sensation one bit. 

“I know your scent,” the Reaper said, with another little hiss on the end. “You stink of smoke and desperation. Leather and self loathing. You can change your name, but you can’t change who you are. What you are.”

“And what am I?” Jesse said, head lifted, waiting, tense. His emotions had gone neutral again; now there was only the anticipation of the fight. For once, he wasn’t lying -- he’d never infiltrated Talon, had never even made the attempt. Whatever this creature thought he knew about Parker Leroy, it wasn’t information Jesse was privy to.

But the Reaper didn’t get the chance to call him anything -- the train car doors swished open and Monteith came in, his phone in his ear, talking loudly. Jesse stared at the Reaper and the Reaper stared back, both of them silent, an unspoken agreement between them: this wasn’t over. 

“Yes sir,” Monteith was saying, a wide and slightly manic smile stretching his pallid face. “It’s still in stock -- yes, of course. Privately. Yes. Well, if you don’t mind -- oh, yes. Yes.” He looked over at the two of them, and Jesse saw the vague desperation in his eyes. Jesse didn’t even try to tamp down his cruel satisfaction at the sight; he knew his answering grin probably held a little nastiness as well, and he couldn’t make himself care. 

“There a problem?” he said, and Monteith waved a limp hand at him for silence as he muttered goodbyes. Beside him, Jesse heard the Reaper’s soft, telltale hiss of amusement.

“No problem,” Monteith said, hanging up and shoving his phone back into his jacket pocket in a movement that was almost convulsive. There was a white-green tinge around his lips that did his complexion no further favors. “Just one of my private customers. Backroom bid, special stock, you understand.” 

“Don’t think I got to see that special stock,” Jesse said, cocking an eyebrow. “You mentioned it to me earlier, remember? What’s the deal with that, Mr. Monteith?”

“It’s not for bulk sale.” Monteith shot a nervous look at the Reaper, who could just as easily have been a statue, or maybe an elaborate Halloween decoration. “Individual deals, you know. These are exceptional assets. Can’t just be sorted in with the rest of the herd, you know.”

“Sure,” Jesse said, with a number burned into the back of his brain, an old wound starting to throb. “Got to maximize in those cases, for sure. Still, I’m hoping to get a look at them when we’re done here.” 

“Of course,” Monteith said, but he seemed much less enthusiastic than he had before. Jesse suspected he knew the cause; he felt the Reaper watching them, the unblinking owl-eyes of his mask steadfast and hollow. “Those are kept back at my private estate, however, not in the warehouse. We can meet later to discuss terms, if you like?”

The Reaper made a short sound, a soft one, as though he were about to speak again, but before any words emerged, the train exploded.

It happened too quickly for any of them to cry out. There was a muffled thudding, then the whip-crack sound of sudden fire, and the train car was slithering horribly off the rail, its magnets askew and slivering away like wood beneath a carver’s knife. Jesse grabbed at one of the wall mounted light fixtures with his right hand, heaving himself up as the car began to tip over, and slammed his metal elbow into the glass of the rising window. The movements were automatic, instinctive, born of a thousand hours of training, a thousand more in the field; his body knew what to do to survive long before his mind did. 

He was half out of the window in the next breath, huffing and squirming, the car falling away behind him, when a fist seized him by the collar and pulled him out. Broken glass scraped across his sternum and he cried out involuntarily, the sound muffled as he hit the ground. He caught himself with his left palm, locked his elbow in the process, and felt the breath leave his lungs as the whole damn limb went numb all the way up to his collarbone. He rolled and staggered, hearing the train lumber away, the screeching of tearing metal and gravel furrowing up as it derailed. Halfway upright, Jesse watched in dazed amazement as one of the tacky leather chairs from the car parlor flew up, made a lazy arch, and then crashed back down on the other side of the furrow. 

The click of a pulse gun reloading banished the haze from his mind in one cold rush. 

“Stay down, now.”

The gun’s barrel was very close to his right ear. The voice was deep, modified through some kind of filter, or maybe just damaged somehow; it sounded like a man trying to speak through a throatful of burning coal. 

“Stay down,” the man repeated, and Jesse nodded, just slightly, well eager by now to show compliance. Whoever this guy was, he was fast, and he was quiet, and that usually didn’t bode well for an immediate defensive maneuver. 

“You want my hands up?” he murmured. 

“Why not,” the man said, in a tone that should have been amused but was somehow only gravel. “Can’t hurt, can it?”

Jesse lifted his hands, wincing at the angry burning in his left shoulder. Something was either torn or badly dislodged, that much was clear. He peered up at the metal forearm through squinted eyes, but detected no damage there, at least. Small blessings. 

“You ready for a few questions now, son?” the man said, again with that unnerving cold humor. 

“Sure,” Jesse said, his cheeks aching from the wild grin frozen across his face. “You only get three wishes, though, so use ‘em wisely.”

The man made an absent humming sound, as though Jesse’s bad humor was noted, and best discarded. “Gregory Monteith -- you work for him?”

“No,” Jesse said, his interrogation training coming back to him in bits and pieces. It had been a long time. _Short and simple, Mccree, and only then if they’ve got you over that proverbial barrel._ He straightened his shoulders, suppressing another wince. 

“You work with him?” 

“Trying to.” Jesse shifted just a little, testing his ground, and felt the heat of the gun barrel move towards his cheek a fraction, a gentle warning against further foolishness. “He’s a little flighty, you ask me.”

“I didn’t,” the man said. “You a Talon agent?”

“No.” 

“Associated?”

“No.”

The man hummed again, as thoughtful as though he were merely deciding on what clothes to wear for the day. “Fine. How about you stand up, then -- slow.”

His hands still lifted, Jesse rose obediently, sweat trickling down beneath his collar. _Shoulda brought Sig,_ he thought, and tried not to think about Zero at all.

“Turn around.”

Jesse did, and got his first glimpse at his captor. The man was tall, about Jesse’s own height, and broad in both chest and shoulder. He had shock white hair cropped close to his skull, the hairline showing his age, but most of his face below the mid point of his forehead was covered by a tactical mask. Even the ears were hidden, a detail most amateurs neglected to attend to -- ears were as individual as fingerprints, and made identification much easier in many cases. The tail end of an ugly scar protruded from above the mask’s visor. _Too jagged for a knife or a sword, some kind of impact, maybe, or --_

“What are you doing here?” the man said, and Jesse blinked, taken momentarily aback by the furious venom in his words. It was a complete departure from the indifference of before, and though he couldn’t see the man’s face at all, he suspected it was currently twisted in disbelief. 

“I’m a businessman,” Jesse said, alarmed by the change, lifting his hands even higher. “Told you. I’m trying to cut some deals with Monteith.”

“Bullshit,” the man snapped, and weirdly he was lowering the gun, not raising it. “Don’t lie to me.”

“You ain’t my daddy, sir, begging your pardon,” Jesse said, catching movement out of the corner of his eye, moving behind his captor. Smoke from the wrecked train, maybe, or maybe --

The blackness coalesced into a man shape, for a moment nothing more than a horrifying, hovering specter, burning red eyes bright as the Devil’s own in a face that no longer existed. The sound of it was like the air being sucked from a room in an explosion, a fiery indrawing of breath that promised terrible violence. 

The man in the visor turned just in time to catch a heavy blow across the neck and shoulder, and he staggered to one side with a guttural sound, raising his rifle again. The Reaper stormed towards him, a heavy gun in one clawed hand that hadn’t been there a moment before, black and steaming buckshot flying from the barrel. 

Jesse’s hand went to his own gun, but the visored man was clearly not interested in sticking around to see if two against one were better odds. He twisted around, and threw himself down the ravine, disappearing over the edge where the train had fallen. 

Jesse swore, staggering to the rim to look down, but he knew before he got there what he’d find: the man was gone. He turned back, in time to see the Reaper sink to his knees. The gun dropped, and burst into plumes of smoke, disappearing into nothingness.

“Help me,” the Reaper grated, fury and pain in his voice, and collapsed.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> With all his might he resisted the urge to look up, to search the trees and the undergrowth for dark shapes, for eyes that burned like coal, for owls, for the night he knew was coming up fast.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry for the wait!

_Jesse’s assumption had been completely correct: Ángel had no idea what went on in this place, in all places like this one._

_“I knew there was a trade, I --” The pretty dark eyes flicked to Jesse’s face constantly as he spoke, as though Ángel needed to measure what kind of weight his words left as he said them. “Of course I know.”_

_“Because people are horrible,” Jesse agreed, quietly. He was sitting on the cool stone of the balcony that overlooked the beach, where the yachts and pleasure cruisers bobbed, weightless, in the water and foam. Ángel sat next to him on the railing, perfectly balanced, with the thoughtless grace Jesse would have associated with a dancer. His legs were long, and stretched before him, his arms crossed, his brow heavy and furrowed. His lips were pursed in thought. In the moonlight, Jesse thought, his name suited him all too well. “But you wanna assume better.”_

_“Shouldn’t,” Ángel said, more to himself than to Jesse, and he raked a hand through his hair, mussing the careful gelling of his curls. “Can’t afford to.”_

_“Why does it matter?” Jesse said, trying not to sound as miserably accusing as he felt, though there must have been something sharp in his words all the same, because Ángel flinched when he heard them._

_“It matters because -- well.” Ángel looked down at him, a soft and sorry smile on his lips. He looked about as helpless as Jesse felt, which was a strangely bolstering thing. “Because I’m not here to run drugs, or weapons. Or skin,” he added, the words dark and hated on his tongue._

_Jesse canted his head upward, squinting, halfway between suspicion and confusion. “Yeah?”_

_“Yeah,” said Ángel, and his smile blossomed suddenly into a grin. “I’m a spy, chiquillo. I thought you were supposed to be clever.”_

_“What?” Jesse scrambled to his feet, gripping the rail for balance. “A -- what? For who? Who are you spying on -- why?”_

_“A spy.” Ángel held up a hand, ticking responses off on his fingers. “For ‘classified.’ Hynson, and his cronies. Because we knew he was an evil motherfucker, just not how evil.” His grin remained, his eyes gleaming with something like relief. “Did I answer all of them?”_

_“But --” Jesse shook his head, unable to explain that it wasn’t a lack of cleverness that forbade him from believing Ángel’s story -- it was a lack of hope that anyone would ever care, or come. “Does that mean you’re here to, to stop him?”_

_“Well,” Ángel said, unfolding his arms and leaning back, apparently completely unconcerned about the hundred foot drop behind him, “It was meant to be recon, you know. Info gathering. But apparently I need to speed this operation up, considering what we’ve discovered here.”_

_“We?”_

_“You and me, kiddo.” And Ángel reached out, dropped a heavy hand atop Jesse’s head; there was nothing in the touch other than calm, steadying reassurance, so innocent and_ normal _that Jesse felt a little faint. “You’re going to help me bust this thing wide open, so I can get you out of here. So Hynson can pay for what he’s done to you -- to everyone.”_

_“Why would you -- you’re blowing your cover for me,” Jesse blurted, shrugging off his hand, his eyes wide and aching in their sockets. “Why? Why would you risk it?”_

_His smile in response, perfect and serene, was the most beautiful thing Jesse had ever seen._

_“Because,” Ángel murmured, “this is what I do.”_

 

***

Moving the Reaper in his current condition was like trying to get a grip on a man-shaped balloon filled with gelatine, all covered over in black leather.

Jesse’d stood there in the haze of smoke and the stink of burning everything, and he’d thought real hard about his next move. The Reaper lay there in a heap, the owl bone mask a yellow-white blemish against what looked like seething, formless black. He wasn’t imagining it, he reminded himself, staring down as dark whisps of something licked towards his boots like polluted, spreading water. He couldn’t tell if the man -- the thing -- was breathing, or not, and he wasn’t sure it mattered in the first place. 

He knelt.

The coat was real, so far as he could tell -- at least, real at the moment. To his interest and unease, he didn’t detect any chest movement that would indicate working lungs, but beneath his palm the Reaper burned like smouldering ember. He’d had to draw his hand back after a moment, and when he looked at it the skin was red all the way up to his knuckles, as though he’d been scalded. 

“Christ,” he’d muttered to himself, but he’d put his hand back down again, near where the throat should have been. He’d lived too closely to insistent doctors to not double check.

His fingers had caught against something cool and slippery, some kind of metal chain that had been tucked beneath the collar of the coat, and had somehow broken loose from around the Reaper’s neck. Without thinking he’d grabbed at it lightly, intrigued by something that seemed untouched by the Reaper’s burning heat. It was a necklace chain, he saw, with two plain rings dangling from it, all of it carbon black. It felt like metal, clean and untarnished, but it had no lustre, and when he’d weighed the rings in his palm it had left a smear of dusty black, like he’d been handling charcoal. 

They didn’t burn in his hand at all. 

Something uneasy had come over him, then, one of his instincts beginning to yammer away in the back of his brain; it was one he didn’t recognize immediately. He found himself thinking, weirdly, of Genji, and the time they’d been dug in alone in Mumbai, how he’d had to heft the younger man’s weight up on his shoulders and carry him out of the burning train station, semi-conscious and missing both his legs below the knee. Genji had been a strong and solid kid even before his augments, and his carbon and metal bits made him more so; if he hadn’t been missing some twenty pounds or so of leg, the carrying would have been impossible. 

“What did you call it,” Genji had murmured in his ear, almost delirious, and Jesse could hear the foolish, sorry grin in his voice when he spoke. “Mister Potato Head. That’s me. Mister Yam Face.”

“If I could rearrange your face, I would,” Jesse’d shot back, the dead calm on him, not even alleviated by Genji’s usual irreverence in the face of death. “But I can’t, so shut it.”

“My face?”

“Yeah. Your mouth-hole, Rabbit.” 

“Jack Rabbit,” Genji had said, and giggled, and then he’d passed out with his head against Jesse’s shoulder. Jesse had gotten him home safely, of course, if not in one piece, because there was no other option. Jesse would have crawled through broken glass on fire for Genji’s sake and been grateful for the chance to do so, Genji with his hot temper and his honed coldness forever battling, his humor and his stoic and untouched spirit. And Gabriel had -- 

Jesse’d blinked, and for a moment his vision swam red, the itch behind his eyes threatening to rise, though he’d made no effort to call the Eye at all. His fist was clenched around the rings, so tightly they were digging into his flesh. He tucked them in his coat pocket The Reaper hadn’t moved, and after a moment Jesse, with strange and automatic movements, had lifted him into a fireman’s carry, risen to his feet, and begun the long trek back to the truck.

He called Sigma in the cab and told her to pack up and meet him at the safehouse: an old fruit-packing plant on the edge of the northern jungle, half overtaken by vines and foreign invasives. There, he figured, he’d have the room to deal with the Reaper, and to figure out how the hell he was going to get his hands on the boxes now, with Monteith likely good and dead. 

Not to mention the man in the visor, yet another extraneous variable dropped onto his plate without warning. Jesse’d been dazed, for sure, but he’d seen the man’s reaction to him, when he’d turned around, the weird and strangely invested anger that had risen in his voice. It was recognition, either on a personal level or in regard to Jesse’s deeds, and neither of those options was a pleasant one to consider. Both came with their own sets of variables, and Jesse had had just about enough of curveballs being chucked at his head for one lifetime. 

The muddy road that twisted through the jungle towards the plant was just the right degree of wet for a quagmire, and Jesse’d been fool enough to invest in a truck with wheels, figuring they’d do him more good on the terrain than anything that hovered. By the time he pulled up in the plant yard, where the ferns and loam were worn thin by tire tracks and footprints, Zero was bobbing around out front, stepping carefully in between holes in the sod with their flat little feet. They had clearly heard him coming from a ways off; their head and eye remained fixed on the road even as they paced, and when Jesse parked the truck and opened the door their eye turned a soft, glowing pink with pleasure.

“Hi Jesse.”

“Hey, kid.” There’d been no sound from the Reaper in the truck bed, so Jesse figured he had a little more time, and he bend down and scooped the little bot up into a hug. Their casing was warm and pleasantly alive, their delicate arms curving around his neck with a child’s sweetness. The sound they made was one of simple, relieved pleasure, and when Jesse set them down again they beeped a contented series of musical tones, a little tune all their own. 

“Sigma’s inside, Jesse,” they said, trundling after him as he went around to the back of the truck. “She’s very happy you’re all right.”

“She oughta know by now how hard I am to kill,” Jesse said, and put a boot up on the bumper to get a look at his newest burden. “Stay down there for a sec, okay?”

If Zero responded, Jesse didn’t hear them; his head and ears had suddenly filled with a cold rushing sensation, the surge of _do something_ that meant adrenaline flooding, his body stiffening, primed for battle.

The Reaper was gone. The black coat lay spread and empty across the truck bed, its hue faded as though from long exposure to sun. The elbows were worn down to the lining threads, and great tears and gashes were everywhere, their edges cracked and crumbling, brittle with age and long disuse. Dark, rusty patches stained it from top to bottom. Loose threads, muddled brown and gray, trailed from the seams.

No one had worn this coat in a long, long time.

“Jesse?” Zero piped from below. “Your temperature has dropped. Are you okay? Jesse?”

“Fine, kiddo,” Jesse said, his voice belonging to a man who’d never known fear in his life, a man Jesse did not know. “Think something blew outta the bed on the way up, that’s all.”

With all his might he resisted the urge to look up, to search the trees and the undergrowth for dark shapes, for eyes that burned like coal, for owls, for the night he knew was coming up fast.

***

“There’s been no word over the wire,” Sigma said. She was staring down at her datapad, and Jesse knew if she had eyebrows, she would’ve been scowling. “Not on Monteith, not on you, not even on the train. I suspect the Argentinian police are trying to keep it quiet until they know more and can freely divest themselves of blame.” 

She looked up at Jesse. “And you say the man -- the one with the visor -- he recognized you?”

“Think so.” Jesse held the cigarillo smoke in his mouth and nose for as long as he could. He could almost feel his lungs absorbing the nicotine, feeding it back out into his bloodstream in a pleasant, hazy burn. “Dunno if it was from work or something else, though.”

“You don’t sound too concerned,” Sigma said. Her tone was irritatingly parental, like he was in for a scolding shortly if he didn’t show a little more reaction. Jesse made a face at her, and blew smoke out his nostrils in a quick huff. Perched on the work table they were sitting around, Zero put one little hand over their face, where a nose might have been. 

“I was concerned,” Jesse said, a bit sharply, “at the time. Now, Sig, I’m just tired.”

“We can’t afford to waste time, McCree,” she said, undaunted by his obvious irritation. “You know just as well as I do that those children are on a time limit.”

Jesse bit back the wild, irrational shouted response that rose to him first; a fight would do no one, least of all the children, any good. Better to let her boss and bully, venting her own anxieties through attempted control of his. He was no amateur, after all, to lose control so easily: a good seventeen years of his life had been dedicated to the art of appearing pliant and submissive to whatever mood struck those around him. “I know. I’m sorry. I’m just tired, Sig.”

He wanted to be angry at her, he realized, for things both real and ascribed. The suddenness of the accident had shaken him, but not nearly as badly as the Reaper’s presence -- and subsequent disappearance -- had. There was also, of course, the presence of more than a hundred children, packed away in boxes like exotic meats for sale to the rich and powerful, but that had long since become a dull background alarm, a buzzing in his bones and ears that he’d had to learn to ignore, or risk whatever was left of his sanity. 

_It wasn’t sleep but it wasn’t awareness, either -- it was some hideous in between, a knowing and a not knowing, a suspension of everything but his mind. He tried to scream around the tube in his throat but couldn’t move his lips or his jaw; he heard sounds and voices all around him but none of it was words or anything recognizable, just terrible low dull noise and the dark pressing liquid against his closed eyelids, holding him like a monstrous womb, and what if they were killing Ángel right there, right next to him, while he couldn’t see and all he could hear was that crushing nothing, what if --_

Jesse stood up abruptly, as though he could dislodge the memory completely with a sharp enough movement. Sigma stared up at him, and he saw with anger and shame that she was worried, now. Worried about him.

“Jesse,” she began, but he shook his head and spat the cigarillo from his mouth. Zero chirruped and climbed down from the table, trundling over to stamp out the ember with a decisive motion.

“My phone,” he said, touching his jacket pocket where it rested, silent and motionless, against his hip. “Sorry, I got a buzz.”

It was a weak excuse, but he was nothing if not an artist of a liar; he saw her relax, and believe him, and he wanted to laugh. _There you go, McCree -- build up those walls, paint ‘em real pretty. Make ‘em shine. They won’t know the difference. What are you, a child?_

_Always, somewhere,_ another part of him whispered, as he went on smiling mildly at Sigma, convincing and untouchable. _You’re always that child somewhere inside. That’ll never change, no matter how many boxes you try to stuff him in._

“I’ll take it outside -- might be Murasaki.” He pulled his phone out and waggled it for good effect, then went towards the big sliding door without waiting for her reaction, though Zero gave a worried, questioning beep as he turned away.

The night was blessedly cooler than the day had been, and were it not for the concern of jaguars and the like Jesse might’ve brought his bedroll out to sleep, to let the stars hold him a while, to wake up misted with dew and squinting in the sunlight of a new day, like emerging from a cocoon of sorrow into a wider, better life. He stood a while in the cool dark and listened to the rustle and mutter of the jungle at night, the thousands of tiny lives going about their living all around him. 

He should’ve called Angela, he knew, or Genji, if he could get him at all. Reinhardt, maybe -- Reinhardt Wilhelm had a knack for cutting right into Jesse’s festering wounds, for puncturing scar tissue and bleeding out poison with only a few words. He could’ve used, he felt, a little puncturing. 

But he knew he wouldn’t, save for the most basic of check-ins, the smallest signs of life to keep them from worrying too much. He couldn’t. He didn’t even fully understand why. 

There was movement in the trees, and he trained his eyes on it, his hand drifting down towards his gun with care. A few tiny monkeys were making their way across the low branches at the edge of the clearing, their faces bearded like little old men, their coats dull gray in the dark. They definitely knew Jesse was there, by the cautious looks they gave him, but they had clearly decided he was far enough away to not pose an immediate through, should he choose to attack. They chirped softly among themselves as they went, and Jesse watched them disappear back into the foliage, his hand relaxing over his holster. 

Then, the chill breath on the back of his neck, the only warning he had.

Jesse spun, his gun out and already aimed, but the Reaper was already holding his clawed hands up, palms out and empty, a gesture of surrender. 

“Don’t,” he hissed, without rancor. 

Jesse didn’t lower the gun. “Your friends ain’t here now, Reaper. We don’t have to play nice.”

“They were not my friends,” the Reaper said. The coat was glossy again, Jesse saw from the corners of his eyes, polished and clean, without a crack or a seam out of place. Behind the owl-mask there was the faintest hint of dull, orange light.

“Coworkers, then,” Jesse said, grinning a humorless grin. The barrel of his pistol was less than an inch from the Reaper’s forehead, and he was pretty sure whatever the mask was made from -- bone or otherwise -- it wouldn’t be enough to stop a bullet at such close range. “You had to get up in my business, huh? That was a closed sale. I had it. Then you and Talon had to muscle in and throw your weight around.”

The Reaper said nothing, but Jesse no longer sensed in him the sensation of calm, smug self assuredness. Instead there was a feeling of waiting, something quivering beneath the leather and brimstone, something that no longer had control over its destiny.

“You’re scared of me,” Jesse said, speaking the realization aloud. 

The Reaper did not flinch, only tipped his head very slightly in agreement, as though fear was merely an indignity he was forced by others to suffer. Jesse couldn’t stop the snort of disbelief that escaped him.

“How’s that?”

“You’re pointing a gun in my face,” the Reaper said, quite reasonably. 

“Did that before, too,” Jesse said. “You didn’t seem to care all that much.”

The Reaper was silent for a moment before he said, “You helped me, like I asked. I’m grateful.”

“Sure. Why not.” Jesse rolled one shoulder, suppressing another of those wild, disbelieving laughs that he couldn’t seem to shake off. “But you’re still here.”

“Yes.”

“Why?” 

“The man in the visor -- a friend of yours?” the Reaper said, without answering Jesse’s question, and Jesse nearly responded before he realized. Instead he grunted, and let the gun barrel come to rest against the white-bone of the mask. It made a gentle, hollow ‘tink’ with the contact. 

“Why,” Jesse said, with calm patience, “Are you still here?”

The Reaper growled, then, and it was nothing like the strange noises he’d made before, the small hisses and sighs like poisonous air escaping through a very small crack. It was a deep, animal sound, with a strange, high knife-edge to it, like two different voices making the same noise at once, in perfect unison. Jesse’s gut went watery as the dull orange flared up through the eye holes, as the thick, oily black smoke curled up and off the creature in thickening coils.

“I don’t know,” the Reaper hissed. His clawed hands curled into thick fists. He smelled of sulfur and wood-rot. The coat began to fray before Jesse’s eyes, the cracks spreading through drying leather, material flaking, thread unwinding, rusty blood stains spreading slowly. “I can’t leave.”

“You can’t?” Jesse thanked whatever god still looked out for him that his voice was steady, that he looked and sounded as calm and in control as he wasn’t. “Why not?”

“I don’t know,” the Reaper repeated, and now, to Jesse’s horror, there was blood foaming up around the eye holes of the mask, welling like tears to spill down the cheeks, to the chin. It was thick, red blood, the blood of the heart, freshly cut. Beneath where the gun barrel rested, a circle of ash began to form, and spread. “You did something to me.”

“I -- “ Jesse stopped himself, remembering, suddenly. Remembering what he’d taken. “I did.” 

“You did,” the Reaper said, low and baleful, as he rotted horribly before Jesse’s eyes. “Put it back.”

“No,” Jesse said, hearing his own voice, calm and thoughtful, as though from somewhere far away. “No, I don’t think I will.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "You told me to sit. You didn’t tell me for how long, or where.”
> 
> “On it,” Jesse said, without really thinking about it. “And you can spin there, too.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi! sorry for the wait as usual. **please take especial note of the warnings in this chapter: a minor in sexually charged situations. no sex with a minor is depicted, but it is discussed. also, frank discussion of sexual slavery. all depictions of these subjects are intended negatively. please proceed with caution, and take care of yourself.** if these warnings are insufficient for the content that follows, please leave me a note -- i'm happy to change them, add new ones, whatever is needed. thank you!

When Jesse woke the next morning it took him a number of agonizing minutes to find himself again. The only immediate familiarity was the sour bile taste coating his tongue, the faint burning at the base of his throat, the dry whiskey ache at his temples and behind his eyes. He was home in his bunk with the sheets twisted around his legs and waist, his feet getting cold from being exposed so close to the air conditioner; it was dawn, probably, and soon Gabriel would arrive with coffee and cruel cheer, half singing his morning greetings as he rolled Jesse out of bed, _come on, cowpoke, rise even if you can’t shine, no rest for the wicked --_

“You don’t snore,” said the Reaper, and Jesse, with a violent startle, came fully awake. 

“Sorry,” Jesse choked out around the vile burn of his impending hangover, “Is that a complaint?” 

He’d gone to sleep in the corner of the packing house he’d designated as his when they’d arrived months ago. He’d hauled in an old mattress he’d bought off a local and he’d taken to wrapping himself in a thermal blanket, one of those self warming and self cooling jobs. He hadn’t bothered with a pillow, either -- boots wrapped in a jacket or his jeans did the work just fine. None of any of this had bothered him or made him feel particularly self aware of his current pathetic state, until now. 

He sat up, and raked his fingers through his tangled hair, still stiff and heavy with the night’s sweat. He did his best to ignore the Reaper’s glowing, steady gaze. 

“An observation,” the Reaper said. He was sitting on one of the packing crates, one leg lifted and tucked under the other, delicate curls of black rising from his shoulders and arms at odd intervals. His voice was quiet, civilized. His head was tilted a little to the side, inquiring and feline. He was somehow simultaneously solid and ethereal at once. Jesse wondered blearily if he even needed sleep in the first place. “Not everything carries a judgment.” 

“You are most assuredly wrong about that,” Jesse replied, levering himself to his feet and ignoring the painful spin of his head, the cracking and twinging in his joints and back. He snagged the half empty bourbon bottle from the banana crate by the mattress and took a swing, wincing at the burn in his throat. He’d need more soon, unless he’d done himself a favor at some point in the past and tucked another bottle away in the truck. He doubted it. 

Sigma had brewed coffee in the little solar operated percolator, but she hadn’t poured it for him like she usually did, which he knew meant she was still pretty pissed off about how things had gone down the day before. Jesse poured his own into his tin cup and sipped at it for a while, listening to the steady hammering and clanking from outside as Sigma worked on the transport van. There were parts to be added, paint to be spread, areas to reinforce. He should have been out there helping her, truth be told, but nobody’d woken him for the job, which was yet another indication of how deep in the doghouse he was. 

Well enough, there’d be time to yell about that later. Jesse slipped his battered tablet off the crate by the mattress and set about combing the local news. 

There was nothing in any of the morning’s reports about a train derail, which he supposed wasn’t a bad thing; it meant he probably still had time to smooth things out with Montieth, if the man was still alive. There was also no mention of the scarred man with the mask, which didn’t surprise him. That one, he’d already reasoned, was likely in as dark a business as he himself was, and not likely to be easily spotted when he didn’t want to be. 

The masked man’s final words to him played back in his head, for some reason. _What are you doing here?_ As though the sight of Jesse’s face had infuriated him -- or upset him in some other way. As though Jesse had been recognized. 

The thought made him shiver. He examined the long list of tasks in his head, and decisively moved the issue of the masked man up towards the top. That would need to be dealt with much sooner than later. He’d nearly finished his coffee when Sigma came in, her rotors buzzing a little too loudly. She seemed to be in a neutral mood, at least, as she nodded to him when she saw him, her visor-light blinking briefly green in acknowledgement. The Reaper had neither moved nor spoken since his brief comments when Jesse’d gotten up, but he watched Sigma’s movements with a vague and calculating curiosity. 

“Has he turned out to be an ally in disguise, then?” Sigma muttered to Jesse when she came close, and the wavering tension in her filtered voice told him that her anger was not at all forgotten. “An old friend, perhaps?” 

“No,” Jesse said, steadily. He hated fighting with her, but knew it was to be expected from time to time. Both of them were vicious, driven creatures, and they did not well abide resistance. “Still pretty hostile, Sig.” 

She lifted her hands helplessly. “Then,” she said, incredulous, “Why? Why is he here?” 

Jesse slipped his hand into his pocket and brought out the chain with the carbon black rings on it, holding it up where she could see but using the angle of his body to block it from the Reaper’s potential view. As his fingers touched the chain the Reaper made a strange, low sound, a rumbling of warning, of awareness. Jesse ignored him. “Apparently,” he said, watching them sway gently back and forth, “he needs these. Long as I have them, I can command him.” He lifted his head, looked over his shoulder. The black smoke formed the brief outline of broad shoulders beneath the coat, a prelude to angry stiffening of the nonexistent spine. 

“Show me,” said Sigma, cold as steel. 

Jesse looked at the Reaper for a long moment. 

“Sit down,” he said. 

The Reaper hissed his fury. The smoke of him coiled in on itself in a brief roil, like a whirlpool, and then he reformed once more, man-shaped and solid. He sat heavily on the edge of one of the old crates again, and Jesse saw his claws digging into the wood, deep enough to scar. 

“Good,” he said, his voice emotionless, nominal, immobile. “Stand up. Then sit again.” 

The Reaper stood with a soft creak of leather. He made no sound this time, but behind the eyeholes of his mask, red fire burned bright, smoldering. 

“You see,” Jesse said to Sigma, who was watching the display with some combination of fascination and horror. He hated the look on her face, the colors she’d turned, and hated his own indifference to it all. “Under control.” 

She looked at him, and he was pretty sure he knew what she was thinking. Her hands opened and closed gently, with soft clinking sounds; her eyes shuttered, opened, shuttered again. Jesse braced himself. But all she said was, “Do you think we can use him, then?” 

“I do.” Jesse hid his relief with the ease of many years practice. It wasn’t forgiveness for what he was doing, but it was a truce. An agreement, that a risky investment was worth pursuing. He could live with it. “And I think I can keep him under control.” 

“Then, I leave it to your discretion.” Sigma’s voice was still iron-clad, however, and she was looking at him again, the other question still in her eyes. “But if he becomes a liability to the operation -- “ 

“I’ll end him myself, of course.” Jesse laughed quietly, the sound faintly chilling even to his own ears. “I just don’t like to see a good tool go to waste.” 

The words had the sense of an old echo in his head, even as he spoke them, as though he’d heard them before in such a sequence, under such circumstance, and he knew he didn’t want to examine that reaction too closely. 

“So where’s the kid?” he said instead, reaching into his jacket pocket for his cigarillos and lighter and slipping the rings away in the same movement. “Ain’t seen them in a few.” 

“Oh, trundling.” Sigma waved her hand again, her visor changing back to level green. “You know how they are. Practicing for the drop off, I assume.” 

“Fair enough. Want to keep ‘em out of this. If they ask, Sig -- he’s an old friend.” 

Sigma only nodded this time, and went back out to see to the truck. 

Across the room, the Reaper made a quiet noise that might have been a scornful laugh. Jesse looked at him, and smiled. He could nearly taste the cruelty in it. 

“So,” he said, scuffing one boot along the cement. “That fella in the mask. He sure seemed like an old friend to you, at least.” 

The Reaper blew out a thin curl of oily black vapor, and tipped his head. His voice was strange and sing-songy. “Seems I’ve got a lot of friends, lately.” 

“Seems you do,” Jesse said agreeably, biting the end of his cigarillo as he lit it. “But that one there’s the one I’m most curious to meet.” 

“You and me both,” said the Reaper, a little surge of aggression rippling over him in a strange, flickering orange wave, as though the rage that burned inside of him might also burn him up. “Most curious. Though,” he added, his head still tipped, his grating voice even and unruffled suddenly, “He’s not the friend you’ll need to worry about it.” 

“That so?” Jesse blew smoke through his nostrils, and thought of dragons, laughing and wounded dragons. “Sounds fine to me. Just fine. I like to make friends, as I expect you’ll soon learn.” He flicked ash in the Reaper’s direction, and pulled out his datapad to check his messages. 

There were two new ones from Momotan, neither of which was as cheery as their sender’s nickname would have implied. The first said, _simply, stand by please._

The second was a photograph, taken seemingly from a great distance and greatly enlarged. The photographer had been peering in through an open veranda at a large, brightly lit party, guests clad in all manner of color and fashion, orderly Omnic waiters dotted among the throng here and there. The architecture was distinct, but Jesse would’ve identified it based on the staff alone -- Oasis, probably, somewhere close to the university, where the rich and powerful flocked to see their wills done by eager minds. 

A section of the photograph was circled in red, like a slash of blood. In the circle a handsome couple stood: the woman, about his own age, blonde and pale and tall, pretty in a birdlike manner. The man, perhaps a little older, olive skinned and black haired, a little shorter than his partner. Both were dressed in elaborate -- and clearly expensive -- kimono, and the woman had a drink in one hand. They appeared to be deep in conversation. 

The datapad’s screen rippled a little under Jesse’s left thumb, and it was only then he realized how tightly he’d been gripping it. He loosened his fingers, hearing the soft whirr of hydraulics in need of gentle tuning, and went on staring at the picture. 

The man wasn’t immediately familiar to him, though he knew if he were to look long enough he’d put a dot or two together; this manner of recall had been one of his skills, back in the day. 

The woman, of course, was Angela Ziegler. 

Jesse checked the time on the message. It had been sent in the last handful of minutes. He swiped the encoded messaging system up with a fingertip, and wrote, _the stork is fishing?_

_No,_ came the reply, a moment later. Jesse could almost picture Genji huddled over his own pad, fingers gliding over the letters as though he’d been born with the thing in hand. _Is fished._

_Who?_

A longer pause, this time, long enough that Jesse felt the tide beginning to roil in, just a little, the rise of his gorge and his fury. Angela didn’t get in trouble on her own. Not anymore. Angela kept her head down in the danger zones. Angela was meant to be safe. 

The reply came after nearly two minutes, a waiting silence Jesse couldn’t interpret at all, and when it did it came first in the form of kanji, a pair he didn’t full recognize. There were radials he thought he knew, something like metal and another he knew he’d seen before, but the translation appeared after a few more seconds anyway, and he stared at it, bafflement growing back, inevitably, into fury and fear. 

_Kage-hari._

He didn’t ask Genji how he knew; Genji wouldn’t give him information he wasn’t completely certain of. They had been field partners through too many years and too many wounds to not share knowledge between them as fluidly as synapses and impulses through the brain. He trusted Genji’s conclusions and perspectives like he trusted his own blood to be red when it spilled. 

_Why?_ was all he sent back, while his brain muttered further things like, _why is she with the Shadow Needle? Why is a premiere assassin at a goddamn Oasis banquet like a playboy on vacation with his mistress? What does he want with her?_ And then, clawing past the very calm panic, more questions, facts filing away, things considered for their use: _got his face on photo. That’s leverage. Got his location. Distinct clothing. That’s a trail to follow. He has to think he’s incognito -- man with that much experience wouldn’t risk a public appearance otherwise. And he sure as hell wouldn’t be seen in the open with a target. He doesn’t mean to kill her. He can’t. It’d be suicide._

“Aw, now. Where’s that little smirk of yours gone?” 

Jesse startled before he could stop himself, and looked up. The Reaper had his head tilted with an air of ridiculous, mocking whimsy. Black smoke curled, lazy, from the gaps in the owl-bone mask, though the eye-holes remained dark. He laughed at the look on Jesse’s face, a low rattle of cruel sound that buzzed gently between Jesse’s ears. 

“Bad news from home, I take it,” he said, rising from the crate and stretching. The motion was odd and incongruous with his spectral nature. 

“Thought I told you to sit,” said Jesse, watching him. 

The Reaper rolled one shoulder, flexing, and made a noise remarkably like a snort. “And here I thought you were smarter than you look, Mccree. You’re going to have to choose your words much more carefully in the future. You told me to sit. You didn’t tell me for how long, or where.” 

“On it,” Jesse said, without really thinking about it. “And you can spin there, too.” 

He laughed again, loudly enough that Jesse felt his shoulders bunching together, his body trying automatically to defend against the sound. 

“More lucky than you are smart, I see. That’s fine. I can work with that.” The Reaper folded his arms. His earlier fury over his capture seemed to have faded, and it made Jesse uneasy. It could have been a feint, to put him off his guard, but he didn’t think so. “I’m guessing you didn’t make payment arrangements with Monteith before the accident, did you?” 

“Sorta got interrupted by other bidders, and a train derailing.” Jesse flicked his datapad off with his thumb. He would have to deal with that situation later, much as it burned to leave it off the table. “So, no.” 

“Well, as it happens,” the Reaper vented more smoke, “My organization -- “ 

“Talon.” 

“Yes, Talon. Talon put the purchase price, plus interest and incentive as needed, into an escrow account accessible to Montieth and his accountant, once the proper password is given. If Montieth is alive, the shipment purchase can go on as scheduled.” 

Jesse snorted. “So Talon can take them for itself, is that it? Why would I agree to help you steal shit right out from under me?” 

“What exactly are you going to do with 108 sex slaves, Mr. Mccree?” the Reaper said, his voice gone cruel and swaying once more, mocking in its lighthearted enunciation of words so hideous it made Jesse’s heartbeat quicken beyond his control. “I’m sure you’re a virile man, but I doubt even you could make use of the entire shipment alone.” 

Jesse’s vision tunneled, just a little; he felt, for a moment, as though he were suffocating, choking _on the tube that fed him the air he needed to go on living, his body so numb it no longer felt real in the liquid darkness -- not asleep, not awake, only waiting for the whim of the beasts and demons he’d known all his life -- fluid up his nose, in his lungs, flowing out of him again from what felt like a thousand strange and different channels, his very being reduced to the simple, mechanical processes of retaining life in a shell of valuable, consumable meat -- he was meat, only meat, and there were wolves, oh God, so many wolves, dogs and jackals and no angels, no angels, Ángel, no, please don’t hurt him, please, I’ll be good i’ll be good i’ll be --_

His own voice, coming from very far away, belonging to a stranger in cadence and tone. “C’mon, now. I’ve got stamina to spare. I can show you, if you really want.” 

The Reaper did not reply immediately. Jesse swam hard for the shoreline of his body and his awareness, clawing once more through the sucking waters of long familiar disassociation. When his face was his own again he could feel the ugly little smirk twisted into place there, the oldest and most innate weapon he had. Even faceless he could see the Reaper was unsettled by the shift in the atmosphere, and he was glad for it. 

“No,” said the Reaper, at last, and then, in a strange, almost hesitant manner, “That isn’t what Talon wants, either.” 

This time Jesse laughed, a short bark of bitter, indefinable reaction. “Doesn’t matter what any of you want, my friend. This is my show. You’re gonna dance the steps I tell you to, whether you like it or not.” He drew a breath, raked a hand through his hair; the Reaper was silent, the air of uncertainty still on him. Even the smoke had ceased, and there was only the soft hiss of his breathing through the mask. 

“First, I need to know what happened to Montieth.” Jesse pulled his datapad out again, swiping away Genji’s messages with a gesture. “That shouldn’t be too hard. Second, I need to make him an offer -- your cash or mine, it don’t matter. Third -- “ 

“A more thorough stake of the warehouse,” said Sigma, from the other end of the room. There was paint and grease smeared in places across her casing, and her dome lights were a sickly yellow-green. She was drawn up to her full height, making her nearly a half foot again taller than Jesse. “Even if Montieth is still alive, he may not be in a negotiating mood. I propose we go to the warehouse first, confirm layout, security, and entry/exit points. It seems to me that your new friend here would be more than capable of assisting us in stealing the boxes, should it come to that.” 

“We can’t just break and run, Sig.” Jesse turned towards her, vaguely relieved to have a somewhat new topic to get irritated over. “He’s got special stock, remember? He’s keeping them somewhere else. We don’t even know how many are in that group, much less what state they’re in.” 

“I do,” said the Reaper, suddenly. “Three of them. Not boxed. My partner was procuring them separately, but…” he shrugged. “I don’t know how she made out. Or even if she's still in the area.” 

Jesse eyed him. “And I s’pose if you were to get in touch with her, she’d ride to your rescue here, and blow my entire operation to hell.” 

“Maybe not. She’s practical. Protective,” he added, with an amused little hiss, “but practical. And besides, Mccree -- you’re in control, remember? Just order me to tell her everything’s fine, that we’re working together, all of that. I won’t get to tell her otherwise.” 

Jesse glanced at Sigma, but her lights remained unchanged, her body still and statuesque. His stomach squirmed with displeasure. Reaper was much too eager to dive in now, given how angry he’d been at his capture, which undoubtedly meant he’d discerned some way he thought he could escape, or at least get Jesse and Sigma to do his dirty work for him, somehow. 

_You weren’t Blackwatch for nothin’, Mcree. You can play that game well as he can. Better, even. You learned from the best, after all._

“Fine,” he said at last. “Fine. Give me a few to figure out the parameters, here, and we’ll give it a try.” He shrugged, exactly as indifferent as he did not feel. “Can’t hurt.” 

“It could,” said the Reaper, and blew gray steam from the gaping hole in the center of his face. Jesse knew if he’d had a mouth, he’d have been grinning. “But I guess we’ll see.” 

*** 

_The new mercs have come in, and the estate is filled with strange and hard men in heavy boots and bulletproof vests, their gruff voices a constant hum of nasty comments and lewd jokes. Jesse sees Ángel among them, blending among the monstrous and the hateful with perfect, natural ease. It frightens him, a little, though he tries to tamp that reaction down. Ángel has no reason to lie to him, he thinks. Ángel is a spy. Ángel is very good at his job._

_He watches Hynson laugh companionably with Ángel’s arm around his shoulders that evening after dinner, and when their eyes turn to him in tandem, finding him sitting in his chair in the corner with his book open on his knees, he gives them both a wide, promising smile, letting his eyes go sleepy and heavy. He shifts, lets the book slide off his lap, lets his knees sprawl apart with his hands resting on his thighs. He feels more than sees Hynson’s eyes move across his body, lingering in places already long familiar between them. He stares at Ángel instead, as though the man is the only one in the room, and watches with uneasy pleasure as a faint redness appears in Ángel’s cheeks, flushing across his neck and collarbones. Ángel lifts his eyebrows slightly, and in the look is a question Jesse cannot interpret; he loses his chance to try when Ángel turns to Hynson and murmurs something, close to his ear._

_One of the mercenaries leans over Jesse’s chair, taking hold of Jesse’s limp wrist, and Jesse lets him have the arm without turning, the stranger’s muttered come-ons and innuendos nothing but meaningless syllables of noise from somewhere far away. The merc’s lips and teeth are rough along the inside of his wrist, digging and biting hard enough to make him twitch with pain and unwanted shivering, but nothing will move him from his focus. He’s decided, now. He knows what he has to do, to prove to himself that Ángel is who and what he says he is. Maybe even to prove it to Ángel._

_When Ángel lifts his head from Hynson’s ear Hynson is grinning, laughing, nodding with enthusiasm. Both of them are looking at Jesse again, Jesse who is half hauled from his chair by now by the mercenary’s grip on him, the strange fingers and lips on his throat. Jesse lets his head fall sideways a little, languid, doll-like, and does not move as Ángel comes towards him._

_“Eddie,” Ángel says, calm as you please, “you know you’ve gotta pay for that.”_

_“Seems to me he knows what he wants,” says the merc, but his tone is good-natured -- somehow, in this fucked up scenario, being willing to take his hands off a teenager he has already bruised at the command of another man still qualifies as “good-natured” -- and he releases Jesse’s shoulder and chin, stepping back with a little sigh._

_“You,” Ángel says to him, as though they’re good friends sharing an old joke, “Have no fucking class.” And he reaches down and takes hold of Jesse with an alarming strength; Jesse is not large, nor particularly heavy, but there is a thoughtless ease to Ángel grip on his body that speaks of a power far beyond human strength. It puts a little chill of doubt into him, even as he remains limp and pliant. Ángel drapes him over one shoulder like a sack of potatoes, and Eddie the mercenary laughs at the sight. Jesse dangles, smelling Ángel’s cologne and the deep secret spice of his skin and sweat beneath it._

_“Jesse.” This is Hynson, who has come over himself, his hand on Jesse’s head. “I thought you could use a change of pace, for a night or two. Our friend Ángel deserves something nice for all his hard work, don’t you think?”_

_“He better keep working hard,” Jesse mutters, as he knows he’s expected to, and the men all laugh. He feels the cords of muscle and tendon tighten in Ángel neck, and he closes his eyes._

_He is carried away from the noise and the other voices, up stairs that creak in familiar timbre and pattern, through a door that squeaks in a way he knows, and he opens his eyes as Ángel deposits him on his own bed._

_“I thought you weren’t interested,” Jesse says, feeling a little like he is reciting from a script. He lets his arms fall back on either side of his head and slowly he rolls his hips up, undulating as Ángel stands over him and stares. “Not that I’m complaining.”_

_“What?” Ángel says, ridiculously. His pretty dark eyes are wide and white ringed. He looks like a man who’s missed a stair on a very long climb. “What are you talking about?”_

_It’s only when Jesse reaches up to twine both arms around his neck and leans to kiss him that he seems to understand, and Jesse nearly sobs in relief and in hope when Ángel pulls back from the touch with a violent jerk._

_“Kid,” he’s saying, voice gone a little high with urgency, “_ Chiquillo _, Jesus, no. No, why would I -- did you really think I -- Oh, fuck,” and Jesse sits up, Ángel’s hand flat and firm against his chest, holding him away. The man’s eyes are suddenly damp, he can see, but he can’t bring himself to regret that either; he can only feel lightheaded and calm, like a stranglehold has been released. “I don’t want that. I don’t want that from you. I didn’t think…” He wets his lips with his tongue, a rapid, darting motion of pink. “If I did something to make you think I wanted this…”_

_“You didn’t,” Jesse says, poised and soft-voiced, leaning gently against that bracing hand. He feels -- he feels -- something undefinable, something wonderful and unfamiliar. An impossible metric, passed. “But now I know for sure.”_

_Ángel stares at him like he’s a stranger. He sinks, bonelessly, down into a sitting position on Jesse’s bed, taking his hand back from Jesse’s chest. Jesse doesn’t clutch for it. He waits, knowing there is something at work within Ángel right now, some kind of sorting, a realization he perhaps hadn’t fully grasped, before._

_“I needed you to see,” he says slowly, trying to make sense of it, for both of them. “I needed you to see that I’m -- I am what I am. And I needed to see -- you. I needed to see you.”_

_Ángel doesn’t reply immediately to this. He wipes at his wet eyes with the back of his hand. He reaches into his shirt, and comes up with a necklace. It’s a long, simple silver chain, un-ornamented. Two rings, both of unburnished black and no further design, dangle there._

_“My husband was the first man who touched me, after the guy who raped me,” he says. Jesse watches him, watches the sway of the rings beneath his fist. “It took me a long, long time to trust him that way. He didn’t care at all, which was so weird to me -- up ‘til that point, I felt like fucking was the highest way to show someone you cared about them. I’d been taught that. He taught me otherwise.” He looks at Jesse, calm again now, and lets the necklace drop. The rings nestle against his chest, a part of him. “I don’t want that from you, Jesse.”_

_“Because of your husband?” Jesse says, unable to help himself. To his credit Ángel doesn’t flinch from the question._

_“No,” he says. “Because of you.” He pauses. “Because you have no idea what you want, or even how to figure that out. You’re a kid. This isn’t how it’s supposed to be, for you.”_

_“I know, Ángel,” Jesse says, sliding over to him. He leans against Ángel’s side, hoping he won’t be pushed away again, hoping the man understands that things are different, now. He closes his eyes in relief and in renewed hope when Ángel’s arm comes down around his shoulders, protective and warm._

_“Gabriel,” Ángel says, quietly. “My name’s Gabriel.”_

_And Jesse nods, and says nothing, and Gabriel doesn’t either. The lights in the garden come on outside. The scent of the sea drifts in, briny and damp, through the bedroom window._


End file.
